


Heroes Don't Come Home

by oncethrown



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Gen, PTSD, Parents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-28
Updated: 2014-06-28
Packaged: 2018-02-06 15:41:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1863279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oncethrown/pseuds/oncethrown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during # 54 The Beginning. The mothers of the Animorphs reflect on the changed world and their changed children.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Naomi at the Body

I didn't see her death, and I had learned that I probably wouldn't have understood it if I had seen it happen. It was all too much. It was outside of my world. Everything that was happening was. The woods, the Hork-Bajir. The Animorphs. The Yeerks. I was a lawyer in a war. Lawyers are for afterward. And I knew that. And if I hadn't, the kids damn well reminded me.

Marco, in the tin-man voice he used when he couldn't be funny, but had to be practical, was the one who told me that my daughter had been killed. He didn't go into a lot of detail. He used the word 'brave' too many times. He used the word sacrifice only once.

Sara started to cry. Jordan held her. I held Jordan. Marco nodded at us at went back to the world they had all bought with blood.

I guess it's not a surprise that I just couldn't process the information that Rachel had been killed. Death in a spaceship after being attacked by her cousin who was both a snake and an alien rebel because her best friend had defied a direct order from her other cousin and given one alien menace's technology to another?

It was too outlandish. An impossible death on top of too many other impossible things. All too fast.

Rachel had turned into a grizzly bear in my kitchen only a few weeks ago while her alien friend distracted my other daughters. My family, along with a few others had been hauled off to be refugees in a freaking meadow full of aliens, held hostage under the muscle of our mutating 16 year old children.

Those were the things that were too strange, too unbelievable to deal with, and those are things I had to fight against so hard because it was better than the things that hurt too much to deal with.

Rachel wasn't the Rachel that I thought she was. She was a warrior. They all were. Her friends had all seen so much more pain, slavery, destruction, cruelty and war.

Realizing what had happened to our children struck us hard in those first few days and the horror of what our children had needed to become was something that we, the parent refugees, communicated, but never once discussed. We acknowledged it with tight shoulders and tight faces. When Jake gave an order in his weary voice, or Marco picked apart a plan with the insightfulness of a true and fire-tested tactician, my eyes would meet Michelle's, or Peter's, and then we would look away too quickly.

We could hardly talk to each other about it. We would be bitching about the escape drills, or trying to distract ourselves with pointless conversation while the kids were out on a mission they might not come back from, and our voices would just peter out mid-sentence.

It was too much. Our babies had been at war since they were thirteen. Jake had been thirteen when he'd become a general. Marco had been thirteen when he became a lieutenant. Rachel had been thirteen when she became a killer.

They were battle hardened. They were determined. They were willing to make sacrifices to win.

My strong, brilliant, girl. The one my little daughters looked up too wasn't just battle hardened, she was blood thirsty.

Eva looked up to my nephew as a leader, a great Yeerk killer, the thing that monsters told each other campfire stories about. And he was afraid of Rachel. They all were.

But the worst part, the worst, was that we hadn't noticed how different our children had become. Their actions, their war, was a shock to us.

They'd come home, tired, hungry, hiding tears, and we'd asked them to go take out the garbage, grab a take out menu out of the drawer.

It was something I couldn't digest. Couldn't believe. Couldn't face.

I could feel bad when I heard Cassie's parents talking. They had noticed how tired she was, but wrote it off on Cassie being a teenager and always working too hard. They had noticed that she occasionally forgot a chore or an assignment but always attributed it to her workload, or to some cute, innocent, puppy-love affair with Jake distracting her hormone riddled mind.

Marco's father had blamed himself, and then his remarriage, never imagining that Marco was trying to save Earth from the mother he though was dead, and that he had almost had to destroy her several times. Eva knew this, had to know it. Never once said anything.

And when I tried to examine my own home over the last few years?

The guilt was too much.

Rachel had been changing under my nose, everyday, and I'd done nothing. Willfully ignored it at times, because I was too busy.

Her grades had dropped. Not rock bottomed, but slipped from straight A's to B minuses and C plusses. I should have asked then.

Her bulletin board of cheerful, if naïve, sayings about personal growth became quotes about battle and anger and victory and death. Then she'd stopped using it altogether. I should have asked then.

Jordan and Sara had both come to me about her nightmares. They'd both fought to wake her while she kicked and screamed.

Even the way she always kept the window open, or how once in a while I'd hear soft, one-sided conversations in her room should have been a clue that something was different. Off. Dangerous.

I couldn't have possibly begun to guess the truth. None of us could have. My daughter was fighting aliens alongside her pre-pubescent friends and her boyfriend, who was in her room all the time, was an abused child who'd become ah hawk and could sometimes be human and was always quiet because he had nearly been tortured to death during the course of their war?

That Rachel had been the reason for all the inexplicable escaped elephant rampages? That she had stolen and piloted the jet that had scared all of downtown to death when it nearly crashed into a building?

No. I never could have guessed.

But with the grades and the mood swings and her new tendency to talk to herself? I should have suspected drugs. Or at the very, extreme least not angrily ignored her father when he called and suggested it. Not taken it as a baseless insult to my ability to be a parent.

I should have suspected drugs or depression or a bad crowd. I should have at least wondered. At least worried.

If I had asked her, she never would have told me. She would never have betrayed her friends or her cause. She never would have given up the war that had become her drug.

Not matter what I had noticed, or asked about, I would have found myself shocked and repulsed when Rachel revealed who she really was. The pain and fear I felt watching her friends pull away from her. When I heard Aximili the Alien accuse her of being the thing that these other soldiers, already robbed of all innocence, feared.

I still would have seen the look on her face when, after nearly killing a man with a stolen army truck full of explosives, she truly thought she had been so fixated on blood that she had not even heard a direct order.

After everything, the war was revealed. The Andalites capitulated and Jake became the sad, destroyed, hero of a galaxy. Sarah and Jordan and I moved to the other side of the country and tried to move on.

And a body was found, floating in space.

Cassie went with me to identify it. We both cried. Broke down and clung to each other. Cassie's tears were grief. Deep mourning for Rachel's life that she must have been holding back since those first days of bulletin boards and gymnastics.

There was grief in my tears too. Loss. Pain.

But what I'll never tell another soul is that while I cried over my daughter's body I thought of the others. I thought of the woman my daughter had turned into trying to live in the world. And mostly, _mostly,_ I cried because I was relieved that Rachel was dead.

* * *


	2. The General in his Room

The universe was safer. The world was saved. We'd been freed. Tom was dead. Jake was upstairs.

Sleeping.

I had put a frozen pizza for dinner, having given up on the quest for a perfectly healthy meal that my family would eat. At least for the time being. We were all still recovering. Steve and I from being enslaved and drafted into a war where, it turned out, our sons were generals on opposites sides. Jake was recovering from… so much that we couldn't even comprehend it. All of us were still trying to make sense of Tom's death.

Steve was watching TV on the couch. I check to make sure that the cheese wasn't bubbling yet and brought him a beer. He was watching the news with a dazed expression. Jake was on it. He usually was.

Two months, almost, since that final battle, but the news was still all Animorphs this, Yeerks that. Andalites, Hork-Bajir, Visser One.

Jake Berenson, Jake Berenson, Jake Berenson.

A video of Jake walking off the pool ship changed to a school picture, one that we had lost when the town had burned. It was an old picture. I remembered it. His first junior high picture. I had been so upset with him after the proofs came back because he had forgotten all about it so I'd had to give his relatives a picture of him with his hair a mess, circles under his eyes, and wearing a dirty shirt.

The reporter, in the tone of awe that people used with they talked about The Big Hero of the War was explaining that the photo was taken just after Jake had become the leader of the Animorphs.

I watched, aware that my face was falling into the same dazed expression as my husband's.

It was too much to take in. We were trying, truly, and some things were normalizing. Jake getting picked up in private jets for meetings and talk shows and interviews. The Hork Bajir being on the news and in the forests. The occasional spaceship overhead. Him sleeping a lot and not really talking.

Even a few of the really crazy things that I had seen were starting to seem more normal in my memory. Like when Jake's Hork Bajir… friend or comrade, Toby, had shown up with an honor guard one afternoon and sat visiting with Jake at the kitchen table for an hour. I'd brought her a cup of coffee because I wasn't sure how else you show hospitality to important alien guests. Toby had looked at the cup, politely befuddled, but accepted it. The image I had of Toby using a soup spoon to pour a little coffee into her beak because she felt obligated to try some after it was brought to her wasn't something that I'd forget anytime soon.

I know I'm not the first mother whose child has revealed some secret life to her. I have friends with kids Jake's age. Back when things were still normal I'd had friends call weeping over pregnant daughters. Angry about a child's drug use. Enraged over an addiction. One friend had called in a hushed and shocked voice after coming home an hour early to find her son en flagrante with his male best friend.

Jake's secret life was different. My friend's issues were valid, but so small in comparison. If expectation was a dam, their children's surprises were leaks. Jake's was like running a bulldozer right through the thing and watching the water gush through.

The picture on the news, a middle school picture of a tired child whose secrets I never could have guessed when I scolded him about how much the pictures cost changed to a video. Black and green nighttime security camera footage. Taller, broader Jake, fearlessly facing down an Army General and his armed men between a fence and an army truck. There was a gorilla behind him. Marco. A graceful blue deer on his other side. Aximili Esgarouth Isthill, who, when we had met him, said we were welcome to call him Aximili and bowed in a very formal way.

He had come to visit Jake right after the war had ended. That had been the single strangest thing to happen to Steve and I. I had decided to like Andalites after a couple weeks as a Yeerk slave. The enemy of my enemy and all that.

Aximili had been a shock. He was flawlessly polite. Terribly charming. Incredibly deferent to Steve and I. Like we were dignitaries and heroes that he was meeting, not the other way around.

He had come into our home as an Andalite, and Jake had invited him into the kitchen where he had "morphed" into a very handsome young man with creamy, caramel colored skin and devilishly curled hair.

Steve and I had gone upstairs, but paused a few steps from the top and very quietly settled in to eavesdrop. We wanted to understand our son. What better way than listening to him talk to one of his alien lieutenants from his secret war?

Aximli talked in a weird repetitive way. After Jake offered him food Steve and I struggled to make out the words while he talked in a melancholy tone with his mouth full. We understood almost nothing. We exchanged glances when we realized that he always referred to Jake as "Prince Jake" and when Jake said, in his tired, heavy voice, "Do you still have to call me that now that you're a prince too?" Axmili had responded that Jake would always be his Prince.

Jake called him 'Ax-man'. This charming alien with the impossible name who knew him better than we did. Jake talked to him like they were basketball buddies from school.

We came back downstairs while Aximili was turning back into his own real body, which was still melting and changing in the way that I had first seen on my driveway, when, with a slug in my brain, I had seen my son send me a message of freedom in feathers.

Jake, for some reason I didn't understand, and still hadn't asked about, had stopped Aximil before he walked out the door, run to the freezer and come back to the living room with two tubes of Pillsbury Cinnamon rolls from our freezer. Aximili had seemed beyond words. He had touched the cardboard tubes to his chest, as though they were a precious, extravagant gift, and Jake had hugged him and said goodbye.

Jake had gotten a little misty eyed when the door shut behind Aximili. It was the only time we'd seen him cry yet.

The video on the news changed again. Now it was Jake, Cassie and Marco on one of the many talk shows they had been on. Jake looked handsome and stoic. Cassie looked politely interested. Marco was cheerful and telling a story that had the host and audience roiling with laughter, calming only when Marco set a hand on Jake's shoulder and said something about their fearless leader "Big Jake" saving them all in the pinch.

"Big Jake," Steve repeated quietly. "It's his birthday in two weeks. Seventeen." I took his beer from him and took a sip. "So grown up," Steve whispered.

I heard footsteps on the steps, then the kitchen. Jake was up. He popped his head into the living room. "Pizza smells great. Is it almost done?"

I snapped out of my news induced funk, from watching my baby grow up the way the rest of the world was watching him, to trying to concentrate on the sleep-touseled young man in front of me. Big Jake the Hero with his hair sticking up in the back just like it had after he woke up from a nap when he was little.

"Yeah, sweetheart. Nearly ready. I'll just get the table set."

Jake glanced at the TV, now showing him shaking hands with the president.

"I'll do it."

Plates clanked quietly in the background as the news finally moved on from Jake to Marco. He was going to be in a movie or something.

We sat down together, one empty chair at the table. Steve and I talked about what still needed to be done on the house. Baseboard. Shutters. Carpet for the basement. The usual debate on weather or not we wanted a swimming pool.

Jake updated us on his schedule for the next two weeks. Cabinet meetings. A Senate Hearing. Taxxon conversions were starting and they wanted him there at the first few as a good faith gesture.

He reminded me of my father now when he spoke. Heavy. Like he was just a slightly more solid presence than everything else in the world.

Seventeen in two weeks.

I didn't know yet that I'd spend years learning about the man my son became through other people.

That his father and I would both be in line to buy Marco's book, hide it in the same place in our bedroom and only ever read it with the door closed.

That we would watch news clips and collect articles about everything related to the Animorphs, but never ask Jake about the inexplicable crocodile attack on a news station, or the McDonalds downtown whose sudden inexplicable burning had been linked to Dracon fire. Or any of the random animal attacks around town, or about the tiger that had nearly bled to death in the mall a few years ago.

We'd never mention that we'd read every account of an ex-controller who'd fought them. Who had nearly killed them. People missing eyes and limbs who still called him hero. People who had hosted Yeerks high up in the pecking order who wrote books or did interviews on how much the Visser had hated and feared Jake. When he was thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.

I didn't know that I would  _never_  ask him when he'd given the order for his brother's death. Never ask him about the Visser's lawyers accusing him of war crimes. Never tell him that we heard him sneak out at night or that Marco's mother had told me that he went down to Rachel's grave.

That night, sitting down to dinner, wondering about the young man in front of me, how he was doing, how he would recover, I didn't know that my youngest son would haunt my house as much as my oldest did, while the world build a Hero's sarcophagus around him.

Not yet.

 


	3. Miracle in the Sky

It is an endlessly strange feeling to have been.

I have been a refugee, though, in this part of the world, at this time, that's not uncommon.

I have been a teacher to a group of sweet, though somewhat simple, aliens.

I have been blind.

I have been a mother.

That's the one that sticks.

When I first got hurt, I understood that I couldn't be a mother anymore. I couldn't remember Tobias. Couldn't take care of him. Couldn't keep him. I'm sure every woman who has given up a child imagines reuniting with them. I'm equally sure none of them imagined the reunion that Tobias and I had.

I had liked Tobias.

It sounds ridiculous. I was his  _mother_. A long time ago. But we hadn't been a family. Not really. I'd known that. I could see Eva's family: her husband, her son, happy and together. Also reunited. They were family.

Tobias and I were friendly, which was to be expected from two people who were just meeting each other. Back then, in the camp, when everyone's world had changed just as much as mine had, I couldn't shake the feeling that I made him sad.

I had tried to just not interfere. I let him be with that beautiful blond girl that he had obviously loved. I let him win his war. I had no power to stop him.

Cassie's mother Michelle, an unfailingly kind woman who still sends me a Christmas card, and stops to chat on the very rare occasions that we ran into each other in town, had asked me, during that battle we all knew would one way or another, be the last, if I would take Tobias home with me.

I'd said yes, without taking so much as a moment to think. And I'd known that I meant it.

It hadn't worked out that way, and I was saddened by that, but it was the ache of regret, not the acute pain of loss.

I had liked him.

What else do you say about a son that you can't remember who shows up as a red-tail hawk, save you from monsters, heals you and gives you magic powers before bringing you to a meadow full of creatures? It was like an old myth. It wasn't something that really happened.

Tobias, the boy I'd never really had, was gone now. But his gifts lingered.

I could see. I'd gotten a good paying job and moved to a safer place. But it wasn't until I saw Marco on TV, suddenly handsome and grown up, turning into animal after animal for the cheers of the crowd on some silly late night show, that I realized I was only using one of the gifts Tobias had given me.

It was miraculous that I could see, sure, but I could also still morph.

After a lot of dithering, I finally called Cassie's mother. She was a vet for the local zoo. I asked her for a favor. I don't think I could have convinced her if Cassie hadn't happened to have been home and made my case for me.

I went to the Gardens with the two of them and with Cassie's mother's keys and Cassie's experience and advice I had acquired what felt like half the zoo. Creature after creature. I looked at the tigers for a long time, but the sadness in Cassie's eyes at the enclosure stopped me. I couldn't ask for this.

But now?

I have been a panther.

I have been a dolphin.

I have been a squirrel.

I have been an antelope.

I've run straight up trees and prowled through the forest. I've gone leaping in and out of the ocean waves.

And I have flown. So many times, I've flown over the world.

I always fly as a red-tailed hawk and every time I see another one I think about that miraculous boy who came in and out of my life so quickly. And whenever I see another, I call out Thank you!

They've never answered back. Maybe they never will.

But just in case it's ever him, I want him to hear it.

Thank you.


	4. The Wife in her Home

I wondered sometimes if we had really smiled this much or been so in love before the war. We had been told that we were. By neighbors and in-laws. We'd been told that we were nauseating story-book lovers.

Maybe we were. If we hadn't been then, we certainly were now. Coming back from the dead will do that to you.

We were certainly being nauseating now. Chopping vegetables for salad. Playing the radio too loud and dancing a little as we put dinner together. Breathing in the smell of enchiladas as it crept through the kitchen. We were excited. Marco was coming home for a few days.

Instead of going back to his ridiculous mansion he was going to stay in the house that he had bought for us. Peter was helping me put together Marco's favorite dinner, enchiladas and, incongruously, cream cheese wontons. I'd thought it wold be nice, seeing as how he'd had a tough couple of days. I remember my own courtroom trials, though a war crimes trial for an entire planet was different than my experience taunting Visser One while she worried about the Council of Thirteen.

"How do you think Jake is doing?" Peter asked me as scooped cherry tomatoes form the cutting board into the salad.

"Do you mean in a general, or given recent events?" I asked. They had all been at Visser Three's trial up until a couple days ago. Jake had been accused of war crimes, and while the accusation had been laughed out of court, I'd seen Jake lately. Talked to his mother. It was hard to imagine he had just brushed it off. Seventeen thousand Yeerks hung around the boy's neck like an albatross.

Just under Tom.

Right above Rachel.

I'd tried talking to Jean about it. Lately, she had been trying to get him to seek some sort of therapy. There were people now who specialized in Post-controller counseling. The government and Veteran Services had been offering programs to help people forced into the war. Jean was convinced that Jake could be helped. She and Steve had both seen someone for a while and were much better for it. Steve had been referring his patients to their specialist for months.

I had told Peter at the time that I didn't think Jean and Steve understood. They had been infested for less than a month. They had never killed anyone. I knew that they had been bait and hostages and probably terrified every second the entire time, especially having just learned their importance to the resistance. It was good that they'd sought help. But they hadn't experienced the war that Jake had. No one had. Even Marco and Cassie were different from Jake. You could feel it when they were in a room.

Peter had nodded and gave me the look he always did. Sad and hurt as he imagined what it must have been like for everyone who had been in this struggle for years like his son and I had.

The front door creaked open. "Mom? Dad?"

We both ran to the door, pulling our son into a dual hug, squeezing him a little too hard. Long after the war, glad to see him alive.

"Enchiladas?" he asked, breathing.

"Of course, mijo," I told him, kissing his temple. He hugged me again and we scooped him into the kitchen. His father asked him how his trip had been, like it had just been one of his jaunts taken in the company of the model or starlet of the week.

I did wish that Marco would settle down. I'd heard from Michelle, Cassie's mother, that Cassie was practically engaged to some nice young man from her government department.

Marco didn't say much about the trial. We didn't pry, though I did want to see Visser Three fry. He talked about Jake when we asked. Apparently Jake had been propositioned by an entire family: daughter, mother, grandmother, and this wasn't at all uncommon for Jake. But he was finally doing a little better since Cassie and Marco had knocked him out and dropped into the ocean to force him to morph dolphin.

"Morph therapy," Marco chuckled.

My husband and I exchanged a look. Marco was doing well, all things considered, and considering Rachel's fate, and Jake's and Tobias's, it still felt like a miracle. But he was still different from other boys.

"And I think I might be able to convince him to get out of his parent's house and move near my place. Maybe slowly depower his epic buzz-kill abilities."

"Maybe find him a nice girl?" Peter asked.

Marco paused, took a deep gulp from his wine glass and cleared his throat. "I wonder sometimes… if he never really got over Cassie. She told me this week… Jake asked her to marry him. I never knew."

"When?" I demanded before I could stop myself.

Marco kept his eyes on his glass, tapping his fingers against the glass and watching the way it caused the liquid to ripple. "Umm… right at the end. She told him that she'd marry him after everything had been over for a year." He took another sip and Peter and I exchanged another glance. "Cassie… I think she always knew exactly how this would all shake out." He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again his tone was light, not even forced. "She's doing great." He bounded into a story about Cassie saving the rainforest and a bunch of endangered species and how this time he really was going to start calling her every once in a while.

That turned into a story about a long call with his ghostwriter and then his biographer, neither of whom believed the story about the time the Animorphs had all been sent back to the time of dinosaurs. Cassie had been startled when the fact checkers had called her, and then the fact checkers had been annoyed when the only person who could verify her claim that broccoli was an alien plant was Marco.

We didn't ask why no one called Jake. No one ever did and paparazzi had just released photos of him sitting at Rachel's grave at night. People left him be for the most part.

We all had another class of wine. Marco went to sleep in the guest room. Peter and I curled up together on the couch, not really watching some movie on cable. We fell asleep like that. His arms around me. My head on his shoulder.

Home.

 


	5. Bird in Hand

My mother still saved fat in a little square made from aluminum foil that she kept by the stove.

World War Two had been over for decades. She had let every other relic of her rationing days fall by the wayside, but every time I went over to her house, there was that little foil square full of fat. Every couple of months, my older sister threw it away, only to see it replaced with new foil and ever ageing unused fat congealed inside of it.

It was exactly the sort of thing I'd been looking for in Cassie. Some sign. Some habit. Some tell that exposed what she had been through.

But I never noticed one.

She was different, obviously. More serious. More thoughtful. More determined. I knew the decisions she'd made. We'd spoken about a few of them and I knew she hadn't told us everything.

She had let Tom have the morphing cube. Defended Jake's decision to recruit handicapped soldiers. She had told us about the staggering beauty of the Leera oceans. The horror of Agincourt first hand. The wonder of flying. The terror of dinosaurs. The joy of seeing Aftran become a whale.

She had seen and done terrible things. She had fought. She had killed. She had nearly died countless times. She had changed.

But she was whole.

She had accomplished incredible things and accomplished more every day. She was a nineteen year old black woman in the Cabinet. She had a job she loved. A charming boyfriend that Walter and I were looking forward to having join our family.

She was happy.

And I kept thinking about that little aluminum square on the counter.

One Christmas, the Christmas just a few months before Jake and Marco disappeared, I finally asked my mother about this tiny mysterious square.

She laughed, and I could just tell she wasn't going to answer, but then, from the next room, Cassie laughed, loud and clear as a bell.

Mom paused, looked at me, and finally told me the story.

A black soldier's was expendable in world war two. Disposable, really. My father had been in Europe. Whenever that big black government car came in to the neighborhood, like a storm cloud rumbling through an almost peaceful day- every time- my mother had been cooking.

She would listen to the engine, hear it stop, but not hear her doorbell ring. She'd listen to the crackle of meat cooking, but was never interrupted with news of her husband's death. Other women's dinners were ruined. Other women's children cried. Other women collapsed in doorways. And every time, in the otherwise unbroken quite of her kitchen, she would hear that storm cloud car drive away and pour out the fat to save for the boys like they were supposed to.

It had become a talisman. A protection charm.

Cassie and Ronnie had come into the kitchen then, laughing, to refresh their drinks. My mother had smiled at them and made her way out to her chair in the living room.

And that's when I realized that maybe what I should have looked for in Cassie all those years was survivor's guilt. Rachel dead. Jake a mess. Tobias… god only knew what had happened to that poor boy. Red tail hawks have relatively short life spans. It was hard to imagine that he was still alive.

It was years before I realized that Cassie didn't have survivor's guilt.

But I did.

It was a strange time. The world changing more and more every day. The galaxy opening up. Everyone knew someone who had been infested. People with war wounds, talon scratched on their eyes, bite marks, blade marks, burn marks, were common in our part of the country. Everyone who had been less scathed than someone else was a survivor in their own way.

But I looked at Cassie, and then to Jean and Steve. Jake the Hero had haunted their home for years. Jean had once cried, telling me how she couldn't figure out how to help him, what to do, if he could even be fixed. Loren worried about Tobias, but he wasn't her child, not really. Eva was proud of Marco, but knew more than any of us could what this war had cost her son. He was successful, sure, but hearing how Eva and Cassie talked about him… was he happy? Naomi had run from Rachel's body like it had chased her away.

Cassie never actually told me that Jake and Marco had informed her they were running off to save Aximili, but I'd figured it out. Jake would never have left without telling her. And if they never came back, Cassie would tell Jean and Steve why. She would tell Eva and Peter there had been one more death without a body.

My baby girl would drive up in her own storm cloud car, the messenger, but not the dead.


End file.
